cance of the Fourth Gospel, as even Dr. Martineau 1 admitted, depends entirely on the Deity of our Lord.

The tide has turned in the historical criticism of the New Testament. It is no longer necessary to refer to the Gospels with a half fear that the theories of Tübingen may after all be true, and invalidate all that is said. There are the strongest critical reasons for regarding not only the first three, but the four Gospels, as verily and indeed works of the first century.2

Any view of Christ's character which regards it as strong and consistent and honest requires His Deity.3 The testimony of His friends, the companions of His Ministry, His chosen Apostles, bears witness to the same doctrine. The tradition of the Church, embodying the teaching of the Apostles, makes the same declaration. The gradual growth of the prophetic picture of the Messiah in the Old Testament is a valuable corroboration of what may be regarded as otherwise proved.

If anything is clear about the Ministry and Teaching of Christ, it is that He did not represent other men as being on a level with Himself. In view of the Gospels, it is no less intolerable to say that He was Divine because all other men are divine also, than to deny that He is God.

To make the sharp distinction which to us appears to be necessary between our Lord and all other men, united with Him as they are on the other hand by the fact of His true Humanity, is to put an end to all theories which break down. the essential difference between the Nature of God and the nature of man.

The same distinction affirms, further, the revelation of God in Christ as surpassing all other teaching, as differing in kind from the highest thoughts of men, as being the utterance of infallible truth, as ratifying the Old Testament, and certifying the doctrines of the Church.

We can hardly hope that Professor Upton will reconsider

Martineau, Seat of Authority in Religion, p. 426: Take away the Godhead of Christ, as the entire real meaning of even His ministry in Palestine, and there is not an incident or a speech in the Fourth Gospel which does not lose its significance, and leave on the mind the hazy impression of a half-understood discourse in a foreign tongue.'

2 See Sanday, Gospels in the Second Century: Fourth Gospel; Westcott, Gospel of St. John: History of the Canon of the New Testament; Lightfoot, Essays on the Work entitled' Supernatural Religion': Biblical Essays; Salmon, Introduction to the New Testament; Dale, The Living Christ and the Four Gospels.

3 See Lacordaire, Conférence de la Vie intime de Jésus-Christ; Liddon, Bampton Lectures, lecture iv., and Preface to the fourteenth edition, p. xxx.

But

opinions upon which he has evidently deeply thought. we may hope that those who are fascinated by the brilliant power of the anti-Hegelian sections of his lectures will observe how his own arguments on this subject supply the refutation of his distinctive position, and be led to think how the old truths of the Catholic Church satisfy and explain the earnest longings which underlie his theological opinions, while the Christ of the Gospels is the real Teacher of those truths.

ART. III.-DR. PUSEY.

Life of Edward Bouverie Pusey, D.D. By H. P. LIDDON, D.D. Edited and Prepared for Publication by the Rev. J. O. JOHNSTON, M.A., and the Rev. R. J. WILSON, D.D. Vol. III. (London, 1894.)

THOSE to whom Dr. Liddon's memory is among the treasured things of life will look at the three goodly volumes, which represent the whole manuscript entrusted to his literary executors, with feelings in which pride and satisfaction are almost neutralized by distressful regret; for the work, conceived as it was on so large a scale, and demanding, as in the author's eyes it did, such strenuous effort in the elaboration of all its details, imposed on him a burden which, coupled with other grave anxieties, made him old long before his time, and conspired with the disease which cut short a precious life. The editors, in their admirable preface to the first volume, assign two reasons for the proportions which the biography assumed. 'It was,' they say, ‘a task in which his deepest affections and interests were concerned. It was the setting forth the life-work and delineating the character of one who was to him . . . to use the words of his diary, "the most dear and revered of friends," &c. But no man would be justified in 'determining at once to resign' the duties and opportunities of such a charge as the Professorship of Exegesis, merely in order to find time for composing a memoir of a friend, however beloved. The other motive described is far more cogent. 'Dr. Pusey was also, in Dr. Liddon's eyes, one of the prime leaders, and, as time went on, the main support, of that great Church movement which, in his opinion, reinvigorated, and even revivified, the religion

1 The whole of vol. iii. is practically Dr. Liddon's, although the editors have had to supply a part of what belongs to the year 1856.

of England.' His biographer was not, then, writing a mere 'Life;' he was writing, in effect, the history of the English Church at a most critical period of her career; and the volume now before us undoubtedly exhibits Dr. Pusey as brought to the front, by the inevitable conditions of his time, with a distinctness simply unique. Yet, after full recognition of this fact, a reader may be pardoned for thinking that the author was sometimes a little too much swayed by his natural unwillingness to curtail '-still more to omit'—any letter whatever of Dr. Pusey's or of Mr. Keble's,' although some of them might well have been abridged, and the purport of others summarized. And the same reader may possibly be unable to repress a smile when, after having been conducted (under the motto of 'Stemmata quid faciunt ') through all the ramifications of the Pusey family history, from the legend about King Cnut's ingenious 'officer' to the death of the last female descendant in the year of the French Revolution, he discovers that the great Tractarian who has made the name world-famous had no more blood-relationship to the Puseys than he had to the reigning House; that both name and estate had been bequeathed to the nephew of a sister-in-law, 'the Hon. Philip Bouverie,' the descendant of a family once settled on the Belgian frontier, and the father of Edward, who was thus by descent a French Walloon '2 (i. 458). Fourteen pages are then devoted to the Bouverie antecedents, which, curiously enough, involve the fortunes of a Protestant exile,' and four others to the lineage of 'Pusey's grandmother on his father's side;' and if these latter inquiries have their significance, it might perhaps have been more succinctly exhibited; but then we should have lost what is at least of equal interest, a genuine touch of Dr. Liddon's personality.

If on a very few occasions the biographer's judgment betrays the influence of his almost filial predilections, it is

1 Pref. to vol. i. p. vi.

2 In 1828 he seriously thought of resuming his father's proper name of Bouverie (Life, i. 142).

3

E.g. in the comment (Life, ii. 465) on Pusey's extraordinary selfpersuasion that Newman's then imminent secession would be a response to a 'special call' analogous to the mission of Jonah to Nineveh.' This fancy, we believe, was the short-lived offspring of a well-nigh prostrating sorrow; but, at any rate, it was hardly a good specimen of 'the logic of the heart.' Nor, again, is it fair to say that Dr. Symons, as Vice-chancellor, told Pusey that he was wanting in some part of elementary morality' by way of comment on a letter in which Dr. Symons wrote, I cannot but fear that your authority may tempt others to a conduct which would in their cases' (the italics are his own) involve the sacrifice of moral integrity' (iii. 56).

VOL. XXXIX.-NO. LXXVIII.

Ꮓ

touching and beautiful to observe how sedulously for the most part he postpones them to the obligation of keeping back nothing that is pertinent and true. The reader is thus informed of the existence, in Pusey's mind and disposition, of certain limitations, as we might call them, which materially detracted from his qualifications for the arduous post of an ecclesiastical leader—a post, be it added, which was 'thrust upon him by events. His hopefulness, like his affectionateness, was in one respect his strength, in another his infirmity; the terms sanguine' and 'sanguineness' occur fourteen times in the second volume, and twice within forty pages of the third. We hear of his 'taking every man's language literally,' a habit which proves at once that he lacked the safeguard of a sense of humour; we find him 'blind to what was going on,' perseveringly shutting his eyes' to facts that are unwelcome' (such as Newman's slow-sure Romeward drift)-deficient in tact, insight, foresight, and even in ordinary perceptiveness 3-falling into 'errors of judgment,' taking steps 'wrong' or 'not justified,' inviting misconstruction by a sancta simplicitas which was certainly not opóvnσis, and which showed how little (as he himself acknowledged) he

1 'I never essayed to be a leader of a party

...

I never sought (it seems to myself strange to have to deny this) to gather persons around me' (Letter to the Bishop of London, p. 246).

6

But

2 Dr. Liddon affirms (ii. 220) that he was by no means without that sense.' We admit it if the phrase is applied to his quaint rendering of the story of the Manichee and the flies, to sarcasm about 'the world' bowing God out with all courtesy,' or to such grim weird irony as must have thrilled a London congregation when the preacher put Pharisaism into familiar modern garb, or translated Luke xvi. 22 into the language of the newspapers: 'We regret to learn that Dives was taken ill in the midst of a splendid and select circle . . . and died at an early hour this morning.' Then, 'Alas, Dives! who would be of thy party now?' (see Univ. Sermons, pp. 210, 404; Lenten Sermons, pp. 155, 29). one who in conversation sternly repressed all humour' (iii. 105) was not likely to cherish that perception of the absurd or the incongruous which so often keeps men from practical blundering. If Pusey had possessed it, for instance, he would not have gravely insisted on sacrificing, in translations of the Fathers, the English idiom to the Latin or Greek, because language (in the originals) was so sacred (Life, i. 442); nor would he have elaborately defended the spiritual use of the word ' inebriated,' in pure disregard of its English associations, because Latin Fathers, or the Vulgate, had used the verb inebrio to convey the original idea of religious transport (ib. iii. 339; Letter to the Bishop of London, p. 208).

3 The strangest instance of this occurs in Life, ii. 22, 85. He had to be warned by a foreign friend (Tholuck) of the danger of allowing his 'delicate wife' to spend long hours in the Bodleian over the collation of Dante MSS. He also encouraged her to work at collations of St. Augustine and St. Cyprian, though in very weak health' (ii. 22).

knew of the minds and ways of men. It is not only right to take note of these peculiarities, but it helps us to appreciate the true greatness of his character, to understand how, by degrees, after many a seeming discomfiture, he won for himself, without wishing to win anything, that commanding moral position among Churchmen which he retained until his death in 1882. He 'gat not the land in possession' through the qualities which make up religious statesmanship, through quick or subtle discernment, through versatile self-adaptation, through the accomplishments of a public speaker,2 through artistic merits as a writer,3 or through any form of popular talent, but through downright spiritual force, through the unmistakable purity and single-mindedness of a life which was really spent in walking with God. In him there was what he once called his only gift--a native energy' which nothing could tire out, and which Dr. Liddon calls incessant and inexhaustible'; there was a strength of will which massively bore down opposition, and repeatedly—in Keble's case * not always fortunately-constrained less resolute minds to follow his lead; there was, moreover, a swing of impetuosity which at times gave glimpses of the old Adam, while it helped to carry him over barriers which would have daunted natures less enthusiastic; but the normal tone of his life was so unearthly, 'his thoughts, feelings, motives' were so habitually governed by the sense of God's encompassing closeness,' that men found it impossible not to think of him as a saint. And thus, as Dr. Liddon expressed it when preaching at Liverpool for the Pusey memorial at Oxford, 'in dark days, when hearts were failing, and friends were straying away from the fold of the English Church, and beckoning him to follow, whilst a vast mass of obloquy and misrepresentation, taking every shape that could wound a sensitive and affectionate nature, fiercely bade him begone' (as the volume

2

4

1 See Life, iii. 154, as to writers for his projected 'Commentary.' Compare the account of his 'defects of manner as a preacher, which is given in connexion with his first sermon on 'Absolution' (Life, iii. 60), with a similar passage in Mozley's Essays, ii. 153, relating to his 'condemned sermon.' But sometimes, when deeply moved,' he could express himself in public with force and clearness' (Life, iii. 281).

3 His 'complete indifference to method and style' must always have been matter of astonishment to such a writer as Dr. Liddon (Life, i. 31, 144, 218, &c.); and he cannot be wholly excused for a negligence which seriously impaired the effect of nearly all his writings.

+ If we were obliged to compare these two great servants of God, we should say, judging from this volume, that if Pusey was the stronger, Keble was the wiser.

Cf. Liddon, Clerical Life and Work, pp. 362, 367.